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Texas Judge Rejects 'Clock Boy's' Defamation Lawsuit Against Conservative Pundits

Ahmed Mohamed

A Texas judge on Monday rejected a defamation lawsuit that was filed last September by the father of "Clock Boy" Ahmed Mohamed against several conservative outlets pundits.

The Center for Security Policy (CSP), one of the defendants in the case, announced that Dallas County district court judge Maricela Moore dismissed the suit, the Daily Caller reported.

Mohamed Mohamed, "Clock Boy’s" father, filed the suit in September against CSP, its executive vice president, The Blaze, Inc., its founder Glenn Beck, Fox News, and several conservative pundits, including Ben Ferguson and Ben Shapiro, all of whom criticized his son.

Mohamed gained international attention and a White House invite when he was arrested in Sept. 2015 after he took a clock that closely resembled a timed bomb to his Irving, Tex. high school. One of Mohamed’s teachers referred him to school administrators, and the then-14-year-old was briefly arrested.

The incident led to a massive nationwide uproar as activists and Muslim civil rights groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claimed it was a case of Islamophobia. President Obama praised Mohamed and invited the teen to the White House.

CSP executive Jim Hanson told Beck in an interview on The Blaze that he believed the lawsuit was a "PR stunt."

"It’s a RadioShack clock that he put in a briefcase, and in a briefcase it looks like a bomb," Hanson argued. "They did that to create the exact scenario that played out."

Former Breitbart News editor Ben Shapiro also criticized the lawsuit and said that it was "a hoax."

"This was a setup and that President Obama fell for it because it confirms a couple of his pre-stated biases against police and against people who he perceives to be Islamaphobic," he said.

American Freedom Law Center senior counsel David Yerushalmi, who represents CSP, argued in court on Monday that the lawsuit was "a classic Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or ‘SLAPP’ case and should be dismissed."

There are 28 states, including Texas, that have adopted laws that protect defendants against SLAPP cases.

CSP said that Judge Moore, who is a Democrat, asked Mohammed's attorney Susan Hutchison to provide facts to support the claim that defendants made any false or defamatory statements about the plaintiffs.

"After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence," CSP said in a press release.